JUDGMENT

Dalal, J. - Eight men have been convicted of an offence u/s 301, I.P.C. for causing the death of one Durga by beating him with kicks and fists. There cannot be the slightest doubt that these eight men went to Durga's field and beat him. The motive appears to be their anger at Durga's cattle constantly grazing in the fields of other cultivators. The learned Judge of the lower Court has on the basis of the written statements of some of the appellants discovered another motive, that of the enmity of the zemindars against Durga. Such a deduction is entirely unfair to the appellants when no such enmity was put forward on behalf of the prosecution. The defence was that certain appellants were falsely implicated because they favoured certain zamindars. That is not a sufficient basis to jump to the conclusion that the zamindars had enmity against Durga and engineered the beating of Durga by their own partisans. Death was caused by the breaking of a large number of ribs through pressure, and not by striking with lathis. It is clear, therefore, that some of the appellants must have acted in an unusual manner, and the Judge ought to have taken care to distinguish between the guilt of